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Technology Stocks : Oak Technology (OAKT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nevin S. who wrote (3832)	1/20/1998 12:23:00 PM
From: Baoho Chang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4335

Hello, Nevin. Here is my take about 3D graphics market and Oak's position in it. The 3D graphics market is one of the fastest growing segment of the whole high tech market, and that is why Intel and many others are trying to get in. It is also very competitive and characterized by rapid technology development. S3 used to be the king of hill not too long ago but is struggling now. WARP 5 from Oak is a very good product but it is plagued by the lack of a setup engine and AGP support. These two features probably have more to do with marketing gimicks than real life performance but they so far have prevented Oak from getting orders from large board makers and OEM manufactures. Oak made the fatal decision of not using a setup engine because they believed WARP will perform sufficiently well without it. It is a shame for it is a typical example of failing to take marketing into consideration in product development. They are working very hard right now to add both AGP and setup engine and hopefully will release a new version of WARP in the first half of 98. But they have lost valuable time as big players, such as Intel, are entering the market with their new products. A Warp based board will be available in the market by the end of the month and I think that Oak still stands a chance to have a moderate success with WARP in the near term. We will find out soon. The good thing is Oak does not depend on Warp to make a living right now. Its CD ROM business seems healthy, and they are working hard to try to land some design wins for its DVD products. The picture for Oak will be much clearer once some DVD design wins are announced. Just my 2 cents. Regards, Baoho